Controversial Prof.: Gay Marriage Will Make Straight Men Want Anal

The professor who published a controversial and widely discredited study about same-sex parents and adopted children in 2012 is making headlines again this week for more bizarre claims about the effects of marriage equality, Good as You reports.

Professor Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin gave an hour-long speech at the Catholic Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, recently and said that marriage equality will make straight men demand open relationships and ask for anal sex from their wives and girlfriends.

"If gay marriage is perceived as legitimate by heterosexual women, it will eventually embolden boyfriends everywhere, and not a few husbands, to press for what men have always historically wanted but were rarely allowed: sexual novelty in the form of permission to stray without jeopardizing their primary relationship," Regnerus is quoted saying in the Huffington Post. He added the "normalization of gay men's sexual behavior" will cause an increase in the "practice of heterosexual anal sex."

Back in 2012, the researcher came under heavy fire for a study he did about same-sex parents raising children. The study, called "New Family Structures Study," said children of gay couples are worse off than kids raised by straight couples. Numerous sociology experts and scholars criticized Regnerus' study.

Though he initially stood by his research, he later admitted his study may be flawed. In November 2012, he told the Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine that he would be more careful about the language used in future research.

"I said 'lesbian mothers' and 'gay fathers,' when in fact, I don't know about their sexual orientation; I do know about their same-sex relationship behavior." he said. "But as far as the findings themselves, I stand behind them."

Regnerus popped up again not long after that for another strange claim: straight men who watch porn are more likely to support marriage equality. In his study for the Witherspoon Institute, an organization linked to the National Organization for Marriage, he said porn "undermines the concept that in the act of sexual intercourse, we share our 'body and whole self ... permanently and exclusively.' On the contrary, it reinforces the idea that people can share their bodies but not their inmost selves, and that they can do so temporarily and (definitely) not exclusively without harm."

He added that porn makes the viewer believe that sex is not related to marriage and this somehow makes straight me support same-sex marriage.

"Of the men who view pornographic material 'every day or almost every day,'" Regnerus says in his study, "54 percent 'strongly agreed' that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that."